/hobby/ - Hobby

first of all, judging a work by its 'fanbase' or similar is absolutely cringe

now, richard and mortimer is a sitcom and thus its value is primarily derived, plain and simple, from the quality of its jokes which i'll posit is pretty high but ymmv ofc

rick is indeed an unlikable sociopath. BUT! he's an relatable unlikable sociopath. jerry is pathetic beyond description, sure, that's he's whole shtick. i'll point out, however, that every character in this show is defined by their various frailties with the possible exception of the younger generation, morty and summer

ok now i'm gonna go watch me some r&m, to be continued i guess

>>5292
I don't get the humour. It may be bc of my tiny IQ, but I just can't stand this shitload of quirky jokes and punchlines on ADHD. Plus it's a burger anime made with flash, so mandatory ugly.

i think it has its moments, some of the jokes aren't really all that funny to me and most of the time its attempts of being serious are like "shut the fuck up lol"

>>5303
>its attempts of being serious are like "shut the fuck up lol"

yeah, i heard one of the makers is autistic and as a autist myself i can absolutely believe this, the writers seem to have never heard of 'show dont tell' and this is extra obnoxious when they try to be serious, no one can just act in character, they always just say how they feel

retard show for retards

>>5292
>you’re not evil you’re smart
The show is autism incarnate.

>>5292
Fun concept/parody of Back to the Future, but became a bit over-hyped and annoying

It got old real fast tbh. For all the creativity of high concepts and animation it's really weighed down by obnoxious characters.

>>5292
4chong will bitch and moan about it being "leftist", but i found the ending of season 2 and beginning of season 3, with the currency devaluation and collapse of the space federation to be very shallow and coarse liberatrian critiques of socialism; rick seems to espouse a philosophy more akin to an american right-wing militiaman than any sort of scientist i've ever met
>they're bureauocrats, morty, i don't respect them

>>5412
Indeed. I was pulled in initially, hoping it would take some quasi-Situationist turn but like you said Rick ended up being basically a Stirnerite agorist (the intergalactic black market episode where he hires the dude who "just loves killin'" (fucking liberalism, every time one thinks popular culture moved into a new territory there it is, just with new clothing (in this case existentialism))).
Morty is nothing but an emotional adolescent having trouble applying moral lessons to the cruel reality he keeps getting confronted with.

When they did all the pomo 90's iRoNiC ads for mega-corporations I knew what I was holding out for was never going to arrive. That Harmon had read Chomsky once or something clearly didn't do all that much (and in retrospect oh what I naive sap I was, believing the controlled opposition anarcho-radlib Chomsky has any real revolutionary effect on people! He's know for giving a critique of the cultural dimension of capitalist society – nobody takes from his (supposed) anarcho-syndicalism).

Dan Harmon is alright but the other guy who does the cringe voice acting is poison, and apparently a class traitor who is against unions

>>5563
Solar Opposites is better

>>5412
>>5422
Does community have any dan harmon lib politics in it?

>>5299
>jerry is pathetic beyond description
I can't understand the hate for Jerry. He has a wobbly marriage but decent life with kids who love him, then all of a sudden his father-in-law shows up and rips the family from him AND gets him into all kind of whacky space-time-dimension shenanigans. He might not be a fearless badass, but most people aren't and I don't understand why every character by default (with some early episode exceptions) deals all the crazy shit going on like its nothing but Jerry acting like a real person and not being able to handle it makes him "pathetic". He's whiny but innocent, harmless and probably fun to chill with on a boring weekend.

>>5589
I actually rather like Jerry, like you said, he’s basically just a regular guy. The problem is that the POVs of Rick and Morty are an utter sociopath we’re supposed to pity and the peons and fools he manipulates.

why are you talking about these people as if they were meant to be taken seriously and not literal cartoons characters for a sitcom.
Do you hate peter griffin and bart simpson too?
Do you care to talk about the sociopathy of bugs bunny too? he s probably caused more damage than rick in total. Expresses even less regret. Maybe he has some ptsd?

>>5589
>>5592
Actually the problem with the dynamic between Jerry and everyone else is even worse than that. At first everyone except Rick is more or less normal. Over time Rick "converts" the family to his way of thinking: first Morty, then Summer, then Beth. Jerry is the only one who doesn't abandon his "stupid" values and accept Rick's vulgar nihilism. In spite of Jerry being described and portrayed as weak and pathetic most of the time, he's the only character who puts up serious resistance to Rick's manipulation and abuse, not just among the family but out of almost all the characters in the show.

A lot is made of the Rick/Morty relationship, but the Rick/Jerry relationship is a lot more revealing about the characters and the writers. There's a real Yin/Yang dynamic going on here. Rick is the Yin (masaculine, active, dominant) and Jerry the Yang (feminine, passive, submissive). They pull the family in two different directions and oscillate between extremes, but more or less exist in balance. And like the Yin/Yang symbol each one contains a piece of the other. For all his power, Rick has major vulnerabilities at his core that he sees reflected in Jerry to great irritation. At the same time Rick sees a bit of his power reflected in Jerry that allows Jerry to resist his control and maintain a separate identity. This dynamic is less about interpersonal relationships and more about internal conflict (mostly Dan Harmon's). How the two men interact with their family and the rest of the world shows how Harmon sees people's interactions.

Rick is always bent on "winning" and controlling every situation. He's obsessive and paranoid, and he has found a way to justify this behavior by actively involving himself in conflicts that require this mindset. Rather than try to change anything about himself, he tries to change the world to suit him. It's like the first line in The Departed - "I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me." It's the logical conclusion of Will To Power, to become as God and transcend the world you live within. It's Rick's ultimate inability to ascend and his fallibility that create his massive insecurity and vulnerability. Because Rick is the ultimate Übermensch, he can't accept this vulnerability and takes every precaution to repress and hide it. For all his bluster, he's still quite limited because he can be bested by Jerry. It's the whole God vs Free Will thing. Sure, Rick could kill Jerry or use some pheromones to control him, but that's still "losing" because he's not bending Jerry's will, just going around it. It's like a reality check that Harmon has when he meets someone who won't kiss his ass and call him a genius, no matter how hard he tries to impress them.

Jerry just wants to go along to get along. He's avoidant and skittish, but he does try to recognize and deal with his flaws. He knows he's no match for the universe or for other people so he's perfectly ok with compromising and meeting the needs of others. A deeply understated aspect of Jerry's character is an adaptability that rivals Rick's engineering skills. As much as the other characters take weirdness in stride, they tend to be detached from the shenanigans around them (opting to use superior force to get what they want) whereas Jerry learns the ropes and makes friends immediately, integrating into the situation instead of acting on it as an outsider. Jerry might settle for minimum effort, but in situations where minimum effort is high, he rises to the occasion (like the original Jerry in the Cronenberg universe). His method also tends to work, which makes Rick hate him more. He can best be summed up by his own line, "I just kept crawling and it kept working." If Rick represents how Harmon sees himself at his best, as a master of his craft, Jerry represents Harmon where he is incompetent (especially in dealing with people). However, like Harmon or anybody else, Jerry has a spark of willpower, and like Harmon (but unlike many people) he holds onto it with a death grip so he can use it when he needs to.

The two tendencies are always fighting each other because the nature of each prevents them from ever reconciling. Rick won't accept defeat. Jerry won't push the issue the way he needs to. Maybe in real life Harmon could learn to integrate the positive aspects of both of these archetypes, but in the show they are contained in two separate characters. Morty and to a lesser degree Summer synthesize the two sides, but as long as Rick and Jerry are present in the show, the conflict will continue. Past a certain point it kind of becomes tedious and honestly I just lost interest in the show because the What Ifs were not that interesting and the character drama had played through pretty much all of its possibilities. In an alternate (socialist) universe the show might actually resolve/evolve the dynamic by giving these two characters major development, but in capitalism the show's brand is too fixed and the fanbase is too attached to the established characterization for challenging the audience like that to be allowed. Even if Harmon wanted to take it that direction, the producers would veto it because of muh bottom line, even though the show has already made them all rich(er). They all see themselves as Rick, master of the system but that's really much more a Jerry thing to be, because it's a closed system and they are bound to its rules, where Rick's whole thing is transcending a system and making it do what he wants.

>>5604
i have nothing to add, just gonna say good post

>>5593
People DID express these feelings about Family Guy and the Simpsons until they just accepted the shows are shit now and will unfortunately never end. Bugs Bunny is “sociopathic” but never in a way that’s actually brutally violent and vicious like an adult cartoon, and besides Looney Tunes is so widespread Bugs has many different characterizations beyond just the 50s-80s serials.

>>5606
>>5593
Comparing a show like Rick and Morty to Looney Tunes is dumb. Looney Tunes is a series of slapstick shorts with only the faintest continuity (the characters' relationships are established and largely fixed). The point of Looney Tunes is to entertain with whimsical silliness based on animation being able to get away with things you couldn't in another medium. Rick and Morty (along with a lot of its contemporaries) is still very much a cartoon in that tradition, but it also uses continuity and integrates pathos and moralizing into its core conceit. Sure, there was that Looney Tunes opera short where Elmer Fudd kills Bugs and experiences profound grief, but that's isolated and done ironically to show the absurdity of the relationship they have. Rick and Morty's interactions change the characters over time, and the abusive nature of the relationship is played at times for comedy but just as often (usually simultaneously) as an earnest exploration of the dynamic. That's more of the nitty gritty mechanics, though. The main point and tl;dr is: shows like Rick & Morty aren't just trying to entertain you. They're also trying to be thought provoking or even edifying.

How successful they are is a completely separate question. The point is they aim for that, and Looney Tunes does not.

>>5303
this tbqh. It's like American Dad! or South Park: a so-so show with some funny moments.

>>5648
American Dad was absolutely based and the only one of the three that made me laugh out loud in recent years. Honorable mention to Bojack for making me feel like utter shit

>>5292
I liked the first season, but the second was so meh that I stopped watching it. Rick felt like an updated version of a drunken Homer Simpson, with that cynical Gen X humor (even though he's supposed to be smart.) So the first season felt like watching the Simpsons again, before the Simpsons stopped being funny.

I think that's why the show had so much appeal. I can't name any other current cartoons that fit the Sinpsons animated sitcom niche so closely.

Flashgitz did a good parody sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kQYlBR0jo

Is President Morty supposed to be a communist?

>>5292

first two seassons was good, then the show got populer and adult swims forced the creators of RandM to bring in minorities cuz otherwise muh racism/sexism. The new scenarists ruined the whole show and they started to make shity episodes about muh emotions and relations isntead of funny advnetures. Those tards filed the seria also with "patrarchy is muh bad" and "women have to be muh individualized otherwise muh patriarcy" and so on.

>>9292
H A V E S E X I N C E L
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>>9293
had sex once. did not enjoy it, honestly made me choose to be celibate

>>5292
It's the classic "hehe I'm so leftist but I will still cater to fash under the guise of plausible deniability"

It was good until season 3, then it was meh, and season 4 is unwatchable garbage

>>5292
Shot themselves in the foot with making Rick OP. Once you do that you can't just have fun space adventures anymore, you have to do increasingly convoluted meta episodes. That shit gets old quick.

>>9297
based

>>10744
Actually what really shot themselves in the feet was when they fired the entire writing team for trying to unionize and then replaced them with unfunny hacks.

>>5604
It's for you

>>9297
same, crazy how that be

>>11843
>>9297
wait a second I said that and then i completely forgot I said that and i just replied with same, im such a dumbass

>>5604
Very good post

>>5589
The Rick-Jerry dynamic is just Harmon's idealized self-image at war with his actual self-image
It's the curse of every kid who grew up 'smart' - believing himself to be the hyper-intelligent above-it-all ubermensch to cope with the fact that he's just a neurotic mess on the bottom of the social totem pole
A similar thing happened with Community
Jeff was originally a heavily idealized self-insert, but Abed ended up reflecting Harmon's true self-image (ie, the one constructed out of his lived experiences)

>>5604
Holy shit sorry I just repeated your post with fewer words my man
I swear I didn't read it before I posted mine
Cool that someone else has a similar analysis tho

>>11958
It's a good succinct version of the thought.

>>11957
>Jeff was originally a heavily idealized self-insert
lol how?

It appeals to a certain kind of awkward fuck, which is why the fans are heavily stigmatized as such.

it's like a cartoon version of a Christopher Nolan film

Just happened to tune in to see the episode tonight and hoo boy. le epic reddit moment: new episode of richard and mortimer goes full climate doomer

Morty's girl of the week is a captain planet parody, who is chained by capitalist greed, with her "kids" who summon her exploiting her for merchendise and appearance fees at conventions. So Morty kills them and frees her, but it turns out that she is a true believer environmentalist and capitalism forcing her to sell out was keeping her on a leash, so she starts doing eco-terrorism to try to fix global warming, including burning down a congressman's mansion (also the show unironically does a "muh coal jobs"). For some reason Morty has a problem with this (even though Rick causes planet-scale holocausts every time he farts) and decides to dump her, saying that if this is what it takes to save the earth maybe he'd rather just die.

Meanwhile in the B plot Summer and Rick are doing an apocalyptic bar crawl to take advantage of aliens having an emotional breakdown over their impending doom. Rick becomes attached to one of these aliens, and to prove to him that she just wants Rick to take her away from the planet exploding, Summer stops the next apocalyptic event from happening (and the alien leaves because now she's safe). The other aliens are mad at Summer for saving their planet because now they have to go to work tomorrow and live with the consequences of their actions.

This is the show now: calling you the bad guy if you are willing to do violence to stop an apocalypse, but then at the same time being ok with or even supportive of greater annihilation for its own sake. Basically, greater evilism.

>>5292
Personally I'm not sick of Rick and Morty yet, but can we just get more fucking Community already?

>>6403
this has a shitposting quality almost like roiland and harmon's old stuff on channel101

>>17488
That’s not really the point of the episode imo
Planetina is evil, and she is a liberal
The people she kills are all just innocent mine workers who genuinely have no choice if they want to survive
The system is broken as she said, but the solution she comes to is blaming and killing the people with the least power in the scenario
The “anything” solution she came up with wasn’t to kill the workers’ bosses who drove the system, but to kill the workers who were trapped by it
She is bad

>>17488
>>17492 (me)
And to follow up, consider that the people Morty kills are all capitalists and managers, and this is not shown as a bad thing, terrifying but something that was necessary and done in self-defense and specifically to free their employee

>>17488
>This is the show now: calling you the bad guy if you are willing to do violence to stop an apocalypse, but then at the same time being ok with or even supportive of greater annihilation for its own sake.
like >>17492 says, killing a bunch of random proles accomplishes nothing. you can look at planetina as a dig at the malthusian environmentalists, who cannot see that it is the mode of production that needs to change. that forces them to conclude that killing random people is fine because then there's fewer consumers and thus less production. you see this shit with XR too, who think that shutting down a mine for a day or two at the cost of activists spending decades in prison is somehow a workable strategy
the socialist solution to the climate crisis is of course to plan a transition to a greenhouse gas neutral economy globally
I don't think we can expect much of rick and morty because the show is so steeped in nihilism

this should go in >>>/anime/

>>17492
>The people she kills are all just innocent mine workers who genuinely have no choice if they want to survive
my dude it's a work of fiction
the people she kills are whoever the writers want them to be
they chose to make them "innocent workers" (who voted for more coal jobs instead of the same kind of work in green energy anyway) instead of the CEOs or something
>The “anything” solution she came up with wasn’t to kill the workers’ bosses who drove the system, but to kill the workers who were trapped by it
She did burn some congressman's mansion, though. They just chose to focus on muh workers to make her look bad. The same way media keeps doing with any vaguely left wing or revolutionary character. At first they seem nice but then they go and murder some innocents to turn the audience against them hoping the audience just associates the appealing parts of the character with senseless violence.

>>17493
It wasn't shown to be necessary to kill the managers. If anything it's implied to be bad because it frees Planetina and she's a villain.

>>17498
>you can look at planetina as a dig at the malthusian environmentalists
No you can't. Literally nowhere does she do or say anything to suggest there are too many people or anything like that. Her actions are against people who are in the middle of causing the problem. You can talk about whether or not it's useful to attack fossil fuel workers, but it's not malthusian. They're not random people. They're part of the problem, even though they're a small part. And again, it's sloppy writing they liberals always do on topics like this where they show the plebs suffering because they want the lefty to be bad. For similar reasons, they won't show attacks against the system ever because they don't want people to get that idea. They don't criticize her for being too particular in her focus. They criticize her for taking drastic actions. Plenetina's ecoterrorism is contrasted with Morty just accepting the climate collapse.
>I don't think we can expect much of rick and morty because the show is so steeped in nihilism
It's not even nihilism though. It's hedonistic and indulgent in death drive.

>>6403
Didn't Elon Musk guest star in an episode of the actual show?

>>17488
lol an unironic malthusian retard.

>>17510
That's not what Malthusian means.

>>17506
>It's not even nihilism though. It's hedonistic and indulgent in death drive.
good point. I shouldn't have shat on nihilism as such

>>17553
You can only feel that way if you are a photogenic normie from an upper middle "class" or wealthier family in an imperialist nation. For me, that means this existence is all I get and there is nothing better beyond this. Most humans get to live in squalor and pain, religion is going nowhere until that changes.

It's a fun show that I like. Not my favorite but I dig the art style and I think it's pretty funny

>>5794

Try Bob's Burgers

It's a fun show, I don't think the quality has gone down as many suggest, the new is just gone. The fanbase is absolute cancer, because ofcourse it is.

>>17625
You really think the narratives are still the same? With Rick being on the level of an undefeatable God and the constant oh so smart meta jokes.

>>17489
go watch mythic quest

After watching the Rick and Morty Voltron episode, it just reminded me of how much better Megas XLR did it where they really did not do much with premise in Rick and Morty.

oof some real trash episodes this seasonaccelerationAcceleration

>>18006
First two were decent and the rest all feel like filler garbage.

>>5299
>richard and mortimer
Dead thread, but did you come up with that or read it somewhere? I thought I coined the phrase.

>>18038
Lots of people have thought about it before, anon.
But I came up with "Ricky Martin" in Spanish.

Didn't the creator fire like half their crew when they threatened to unionize and replaced them with Sarkeesian level "we come to filter out your ingrained misogyny" diversity hires?

>>18082
yes and coincidentally the show began going into the toilet right after

>>18082
Yep. Justin Roiland doesn't even work on it technically, he's busier on his personal projects.
These latest seasons are all Dan Harmon and it shows.

Instead of Rick and Morty I'd watch a show on something like vid related

>>13429
>it's like a cartoon version of a Christopher Nolan film
Concise and eloquent. You hit the nail on the head. Put another way: classic midwit bait.

the last two episodes are kinda interesting, but really feel like they suddenly remembered at the end they had some actual story to tell after their garbage filler

>>17492
>pic
this meme should have been in the form of something like pic related, so clicking on it gave a different image. I'd do it but I forgot how to.

>>5292
Depends on who is writing it,
Jeff Loveness seems at least critical of capitalism.
Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland are fuck, tho.
vid related

>>19650
You do it like this. (maybe there is a better way now,but I don't even remember when I saved that)

>>19644
> they suddenly remembered at the end they had some actual story to tell
well they also had some characters to establish that they could sell as merch
they even lampshade it in the planetina episode

>>19653
Thanks